I
wandered, numb and uncaring, heedless of the direction my splintered
heart chose.

Caged,
caught in a web of my own devising, hiding from a world that craved
only to cause me pain, I strayed somewhere between the border of
insanity. Some part of me was kept safe within my minds self-imposed
exile, but with every second I was sliding further into the blackness
that had stolen everything that was precious. With every moment my
tenuous sense of self was dissolving. I was imperfect, splintered and
then splintered again, the pieces so tiny that they could never all
be found, could never be put back together to create the woman who
had once been whole.

I
was simply bare feet following an aimless path into a wilderness of
confused images, all shaped together in an eclectic mess of a future
now destroyed.

The
shadows stretched, becoming creatures of nightmares, haunting my
empty body, leaving silhouettes on unfeeling skin, flickering shapes
of darkness that stopped the light as it wove a tentative path to the
forest floor, shapes that chased the last glimmers of life from a
landscape of frozen death.

A
landscape of winter grey to mirror my wretched soul.

Loss
had torn me apart, left me screaming and insensible, broken and lost,
a wasteland of hidden scars. I was but the ghost of a woman, herself
haunted by the formless shapes of a memory that would never fade.
Haunted by a tiny imp I would never know.

I
stopped my wandering, eyes staring, naked and unseeing, agony
bleeding from the depths of my being for the one who had died
nameless inside me. Gone. Just life's blood slick on my thighs, red
to complement the death it symbolised, the one it had taken from me.

Gone.
Stolen.

My
cheeks wet with sorrow, I ran. Shadows my only company, following and
never ceasing, changing and twisting till they were reflections of my
very essence, reflections of the instant that had left me torn
asunder, broken and alone. Left me nothing, but easy prey to the hell
that hunted my sleepless hours. I had lost everything. I was ripped
apart and bleeding, labelled defective and deficient.

One
moment and I was no more, one moment that the world never even
noticed.

My
dreams were in tatters, leaving me plagued by images terrible in
their clarity. I ran faster, my lungs screaming as trees clawed and
scratched at my face in my desperate attempt to leave behind
everything, everything
that no longer mattered. Feeling like Snow White but knowing my
ending could never be as fortunate. No one would wake me from my
death; no one could give me release from my state of empty stillness.

A
kiss could never resurrect my empty soul, could never give me back
all I had lost.

I
would forever mourn. Wanting, needing, loving. But it would change
not a thing. The cradle would be filled with nothing but the crystal
tears of a woman who wished the world would just stop.
It would never embrace the one it was meant for. It would just sit
there. Just like the creases around my eyes would never again crinkle
in real happiness, my voice would never again contain pleasure and
light, the cradle would sit there, as still and lifeless as a
headstone left nameless through the insensitivity of time.

The
body that housed me was as superfluous and fragile as a butterfly's
wing, transparent and useless without the pith that gave them
purpose. Irrevocably gone and irreplaceable. They had no choice but
to die.

My
life stretched ahead of me, a barren dessert of inhospitable sand,
devoid of life, lacking even a gentle breeze to sway the few untended
weeds in even an imitation of a lived existence. Instead there was
rock wearing away till it was sand. Hard and unforgiving until it was
eroded to be so tiny as to be passionless and fickle. Nothing could
bring them to life. A field of sorrow left for winter to claim in her
cold passionless biting grip, never intended for the birth that
spring might inspire.

Just
a landscape of angry sand, cold and bitter as ice.

A
cold that gripped
me, that would never
leave
me, a cold that had come with a knife of twisting agony and the warm
flow of a life taken to another plane. A cold that filled
my lungs with every
scream that escaped me, every
feral howl into a night shared by shadows and flickers of everything
unbearable.

Overwhelming
despair threatened to consume me, drown me in her murky depths. She
crept through the cracks of my hastily built walls, stole through the
windows of my soul every time my eyes opened to test the world that
had trapped me within a body slowly fading to nothing.

Despite
myself, my eyes widened, perhaps needing to at least attempt to stop
torrent of sadness drawing me below, perhaps searching to glimpse
some beacon of hope however pale and inconsistent it was. But all I
saw was darkness. The forest a beautiful symphony now muted,
everything
fading to soft echoes of a beauty now destroyed. The only song I
yearned for had been lost.